Prime View’s screens are used by the three most-popular brands: Amazon.com Inc.’s (AMZN) Kindle, Barnes & Noble Inc.’s (BKS) Nook and Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Reader. That gives the company a near monopoly of a market where global sales are expected to surge to 12 million units in 2010 from five million this year, according to research firm iSuppli.

With e-reader sales booming, other companies, many of them far bigger than Prime View, want a piece of the action. Rivals in Taiwan, Japan and the U.S. are racing to roll out new technologies and features like color screens—on the top of users’ wish lists, and key to newspapers and magazines making the transition to e-readers.

At the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, at least a half dozen companies will unveil new e-reading devices, including Plastic Logic Ltd., Hearst Corp.’s Skiff, Spring Design Inc. and Entourage Systems Inc.

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E Ink, of Cambridge, Mass., would once have been a sure-fire candidate for an initial public offering. Its sales more than doubled to $18 million in the first quarter on the strength of rising sales of products like Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle and Sony’s (SNE) Reader, which use E Ink technology. But today IPOs are scanty, and venture capitalists increasingly look to the mergers-and-acquisitions market as their best exit.

E Ink president Russ Wilcox said after the sale announcement that it was easier for Prime View International, its Taipei-based acquirer, to raise money by going public there and in London than it would have been for E Ink to go public in the U.S. “This is an innovative way to get access to the public markets and grow the company at a very fast speed,” he said.

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